


Love and Necromancy

by Lady_Anonymia



Category: Youtube RPF
Genre: (sorry Mark), Artist Jack, F/F, How do I tag?, I still don't know, M/M, Necromancer Jack, Necromancer Signe, Necromancy, Strangers to Lovers, White Mage Amy, dead mark, tags will change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 15:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12915207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Anonymia/pseuds/Lady_Anonymia
Summary: A story of how feelings bloom through death.





	Love and Necromancy

**Author's Note:**

> The time has come.  
> This thing has been in the works for a while, since July.  
> I think I'm ready to let my little bird fly off into the world.  
> Happy New Year to me!

Jack padded into the kitchen tiredly, yawning as he grabbed a skull-shaped mug from the cabinet and began his morning coffee ritual. Well, “morning”: a brief glance at the clock informed him that it was almost noon. He surveyed his living room with half-lidded eyes while the coffee percolated. There were still boxes scattered around that he had yet to unpack, but overall the space was coming together nicely. Art hung in every available space: some of it was his, but most were masterpieces abandoned in thrift stores and flea markets, and what kind of person would Jack be if he didn’t adopt all the homeless artwork he could?

Warming his hands on his mug and taking a sip to test the temperature, Jack looked out the front window of his house to the graveyard opposite. It always looked the best in the colder months, and now that it was October the land seemed to carry a little extra spookiness.

Jack would consider himself a pretty normal 27-year old: he had a job, a decent place of his own, and a few close friends that he would get together with for game nights and movie showings.

And he was obsessed with death, so there was that.

Not in a “I want to be killed/kill people” sort of way, of course. And he _definitely_ wasn’t an emo or anything. Death just... _fascinated_ him. The causes of dying, the symptoms of death, and whatever came after it: all the aspects of death had caught Jack's interest since he was a teenager. It was one of the reasons he’d bought a house across from a graveyard in the first place, not to mention the wildly low price. You know, superstitions, spirits and ghosts, et cetera. People just couldn’t understand the beauty of an ending, or didn’t want to confront their own on a daily basis. _Their loss is my gain_ , Jack figured.

With another deep yawn, he grabbed his notebook and a pen off the counter and sat at the small table in the kitchen. He kept his to-do lists in here; it was much more satisfying to cross things off on paper than on his phone, and the book was small enough that he could pocket it and take it with him. He thumbed through the pages of the notebook to find the most recent entry, and his own round cursive stared back from the page with things he needed to do.

_Go to grocery store (eggs, milk, coffee, cake mix?)_

_Get weird car sound checked out_

_Give Robin’s mixing bowl back_

_Pick up clothes from laundromat (call about wash machine install)_

_Renew Netflix subscription_

_See if farmer’s market has any plums yet_

_Pick up flowers_

_Go across the street for new piece_

It wasn't too much to do, although he dreaded going to the laundromat: it was dirty and badly lit and he was pretty sure the owner was a cannibal or something. Something about those beady black eyes just set Jack on edge. He shuddered a little at the mental image.

Jack downed the rest of his coffee and set the mug in the sink, rubbing at his eyes as he headed back to his bedroom. He was going to need to wake up quickly; he had quite the day to get through.  

 Six hours, three traffic jams, two encounters with angry business owners, and one power-nap later, Jack wiggled his way through the rusty gate to the graveyard clutching a bouquet of hydrangeas. When he'd first snuck in, he'd feared being accused of trespassing. With time, he'd realized that (if he was, in fact, committing misdemeanors on a regular basis) that there was no groundskeeper for the land. If there was, they definitely would’ve oiled that gate by now: the creaking could make a child’s ears bleed. Jack really needed to take care of it sooner or later. Preferably sooner.

He made sure to save this task for last. Coming here was his favorite thing to do, and it helped Jack to wind down. People did all sort of weird things to unwind: running, hanging upside down, punching inanimate objects—Jack tended to graveyards to de-stress. His unofficial job as groundskeeper was another reason Jack preferred the colder months: weeds had a lot more trouble springing up when the ground was frozen.

In addition to the de-stressing element, Jack got a lot of the inspiration for his art pieces here. Oftentimes he titled his pieces after the plots that he visited, painting the feelings that their stone markers evoked. With all of the chaos of moving house, Jack had been suffering from a serious case of art block, and he was glad to be back in the company of one of his more elegant muses.

He walked along the path that winded through the cemetery, trying to bring his knit hat over the tips of his ears. Although he’d only discovered the cemetery a few months back, Jack had traveled the path enough times to know some of the stone angels and mausoleums by heart. Even while he was in his apartment, he’d always found this particular cemetery to have a tranquility to it that Jack appreciated. It was on the smaller side—mostly family plots and the like—but there were still graves that Jack had yet to discover, and it was these graves that he was on the hunt for today.

But there were a few places Jack needed to visit first.

Since he’d started coming here, the were a few graves he always left flowers for: Nancy McLoughlin, because they shared a last name and Jack had no idea if they were related; Elvira and James Rodman, a married couple who died within days of each other; Edmund Kinney, who had fallen ill when he was only two years old. It always saddened Jack to see no other plots with flowers, no other sign of people visiting their ancestors or loved ones. Today, though, something caught his eye. Intrigued, he stepped off the dirt walkway to take a closer look.

A bouquet of yellow roses laid on one of the graves. The closer Jack got, the more details filled themselves in: the grave was newer, and the lettering on it more defined; the roses were dying, brown and wilted at the tips of the petals; the dirt looked newly turned over. Jack squatted off to the side of the grave—he never stood on top of them, it felt disrespectful—and leaned in to read the epitaph.

Mark Edward Fischbach

28 June 1989 - 15 August 2017

“You don't know how much time you have...and you have to make the best of it while you can.”

“Oh, that’s a nice epitaph,” Jack whispered to himself, laying his own bouquet gently next to the wilting one. “And he just died a few months ago...”

Jack crossed his legs under himself and sat at an angle, facing the grave. Not many people in this day and age died of disease at that age. Terminal illnesses were always a possibility, but they were few and far between. More likely he had died in some sort of accident. Jack wished he knew more about the man, so maybe he could make a more accurate guess—

Butterflies. Numbness. Overwhelming force, like he had been hit in the ribs with a sledgehammer. Jack cried out, rolling onto the firm ground, every muscle in his body tense and screaming in pain. For a second, Jack couldn’t remember any state of being other than this fire consuming his bones. But it only lasted for a second.

Breathing hard, Jack hugged his arms to himself as he laid on the cold dirt, trying to recover from whatever the hell that was. Waves of the phantom pain still crashed over him, though their hold became weaker with each passing second. He pushed himself to his feet, legs weak and shaky. The world was spun around him lazily, and Jack swayed like a drunkard.

_I have to get out of here,_ Jack thought to himself, as he stumbled to the gate of the graveyard. It seemed to be miles away in his state. _Something is wrong, I have to get out of here, I have to leave—_

Jack slammed into the metal fence at almost full force, his dazed wanderings taking him a little too far from the actual gate. He groaned, the pain in his ribs rekindled, and fumbled with the latch on the gate before walking unsurely across the road and back to his home.

Jack opened the door, almost dropping the key a few times, and leaned against it, sliding down to the cool wood floor. Now that he was inside, the feeling of vertigo had faded and he was able to think a little more clearly.

What the fuck had happened to him? He’d never gotten vertigo like that before, not unless he was in a tall building or something. And the pain—God, the _pain_ —it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced, and he had been kneed in the balls at least once.

There was only one thing Jack could do now.

Jack sat on a chair in his living room, drumming his fingers on his laptop keyboard. The cursor in his Google search bar blinked. He felt weird looking this up, but he needed answers, and the only thing that could provide them without judging him was Google. He thought for a moment, then typed:

_Pain in a graveyard_

It wasn’t the most specific search term, and he might have to delete his search history afterwards, but it would do.

Most of the results were for bands with “graveyard” in the name and “pain” in the title of one of their songs, or vice versa. However, one of the links, labeled “Dead Conversations: Chest Pains in the Graveyard” looked just non-music-related enough to be what Jack was looking for.

_“...some graveyards are haunted...Chest pains, weird ones, like there was a fiery wind in my ribs. I felt a spirit...this chest pain was a warning...mediums ‘wake up’ graveyards....if you get chest pains in a haunted place, time to get out...”_

So, assuming he wasn’t dying of a perfectly explicable disease that had remained dormant until just now, he was a medium who’d been briefly possessed by a ghost. Great. Jack massaged his temples, flicking his gaze to the glittery green skull sitting on his desk. It grinned widely at him, and he grimaced back.

Jack’s curiosity was officially peaked. He’d never put any stock in mediums—his belief in ghosts didn’t make him blind to charlatans and con-men trying to make money off people’s grief—but his experience was so similar to this person’s that there had to be some sort of connection.

Jack stood up, peeked through the blinds of his office window, and cursed. The sky was already beginning to darken. If he wanted to go back out there and...commune with the spirits or whatever, he needed to go now. Jack wasn’t afraid of the dark so much as he was tripping over a gravestone and splitting his head open. Not to mention that, now that he knew about the whole ghost possession thing, there was a whole new layer of spooky that the graveyard held.

Well, there was no time like the present. Jack put his computer into sleep mode and made his way back to the entrance of the house, mind racing. He had no idea where to start when it came to talking to a ghost. Did he need to prepare for it? The blog post mentioned that spirits could break bones and cause heart attacks, and while Jack was extremely interested in what happened after death, he wasn't very keen on finding out firsthand.

Jack locked the door behind him and hustled over to the cemetery. Finding the man's grave was much harder in the dark, and Jack had been so preoccupied with visions of a Conjuring-esque possession that he’d forgotten his phone. He didn't want to go back for it now; he'd definitely lose his nerve if he did. Even with the growing darkness, though, Jack spotted the wilting yellow roses and made a beeline for the headstone, careful not to step on any of the other graves.

Jack situated himself in the same place he’d been earlier in the day, tucking his legs under himself and closing his eyes. A cold breeze blew through the cemetery and Jack tried his hardest not to shiver. He should’ve brought a heavier jacket.

“Um...if the spirit who, uh, reached out to me today’s still here,” Jack called out uncertainly, “could you, uh...gimme some sorta sign?”

For a moment there was nothing. The trees rustled, their dying leaves rattling on their branches. A lone car drove past, headlights shining brightly behind him. From above, a crow cawed.

Then, screaming.

It was muffled, and if Jack wasn’t right next to the source of the sound he would’ve thought it was coming from very far away.

In fact, he wasn’t _next_ to the sound, he was _over_ it.

Jack’s eyes widened and he scrambled backwards, backing himself into another headstone. His heart was pounding in his ears, but over the rush of blood Jack could still hear the calls from the grave.

Timidly, Jack pressed his ear to the dirt over the man’s grave. There was silence for a moment, then the sound started again. There was no mistaking where it was coming from now. There was someone down there—a living, breathing human being, not some incorporeal spirit—pounding on the lid of his coffin, screaming in the hopes that someone would save him.

Pale as a ghost, Jack hugged his arms to his shaking frame. He’d have to run home and get his phone if he wanted to call the police. He didn’t want to leave while that man—Mark, the headstone reminded him—was still screaming for rescue, but Jack recognized that he wasn’t doing either of them any good: the man would be stuck down there if Jack didn’t get to a phone, and Jack was either going to faint or vomit if he listened to the man’s cries for much longer.

On shaky legs, Jack exited the cemetery and wobbled back to his house. Upon getting through the bright green front door, he rushed again to his computer. He just...needed confirmation that he wasn’t hallucinating. It’d be even worse if he called the police and they jailed him for suspected drug use.

So back to Google he went, with the words:

_Can you hear someone in a grave_

typed hesitantly into the search bar. Yeah, he was going to have to delete his search history after this.

The first results were stories of people who had been buried alive, a few of which Jack quickly skimmed through. Most of the articles, however, concerned people who had been freshly buried—as in, just sealed into their coffin, with no dirt over them yet—not people who’d been in the ground for months. Most of those people, Jack noticed, were women. He wondered if that was significant.

The next series of results were all news stories concerning people who’d been completely buried and heard 10-15 minutes screaming for help. Definitely not the same as the predicament that Jack and this Mark guy were in, but it gave Jack the answer he needed; it _was_ possible to hear someone who’d been buried.

So Jack _had_ heard the man down there, yelling for an escape from death (re-death?), suffocating under however many feet of dirt was on top of his casket. That was comforting. At least he wasn’t going crazy yet. But letting someone die down there like that...even if Jack had nothing to do with anything in Mark’s life, it just wouldn't be humane to let him suffocate to death if there was a chance he could save him.

Jack took a deep breath that failed to slow his heart rate. He didn't even know if he had a full-sized shovel in the house. And what if he got arrested for digging up a grave? Was that a crime? How was he supposed to explain that? ‘ _You see, officer, I thought I heard someone who's long dead screaming in their casket, so I figured I'd lend a hand in getting them out of there!_ ’

“This is fuckin’ crazy,” Jack breathed. “The fuck did I do to get involved in this?”

Although Jack had a lot of questions that he wanted Google to answer, time was of the essence. He only had one more thing to ask before he undertook this task.

_How long can a person survive buried in a coffin_

A few seconds for the page to load and then, at the very top, in bold: five and a half hours.

Jack didn’t know exactly what time he’d heard the screaming, but it couldn’t be that long ago: 30 minutes at the most. Jack still had plenty of time to get a shovel, go to the gravesite, and...what, dig it up, he supposed. In his mind, there wasn’t really an alternative: at least, not one that didn’t involve reporting the strange events to the police. He’d be committed to an insane asylum if the police were involved, not to mention that, if they took too long digging the grave, the man inside would be dead by the time they got to him.

Heart high in his throat, Jack went up the spiral iron staircase in the corner of the living room to the attic. The stairs opened up into his unfinished workspace, separated from the storage half of the attic by a poorly hung curtain. Jack darted through the curtain, stubbed his toe on a box, cursed, and fumbled around behind various boxes and shelves before his hands closed around the handle of his shovel. As he made his way back down the stairs and to the door, his mind racing. The feelings came to a boiling point as he squeezed by the gate and made his way to the man’s grave for the third time that night. Laying the shovel on the ground, Jack kneeled to press his ear to the dirt. There was no screaming anymore, but a dull, weak thudding made Jack think that maybe the man inside was knocking on the inside of the coffin.

Outside, almost freezing in the October night, standing over a grave with a shovel in one hand and a phone light in the other, Jack thought that there was no backing out of this. He was intent on helping this guy—Mark—get out alive. Jack slipped his phone into his front jacket pocket with the flashlight so he could see, and gripped the shovel.

“Here goes nothin’,” he muttered to himself, and plunged the spade into the hard, compressed earth.

It must have taken Jack upwards of three hours to get to the man’s coffin, and always there was a fear of approaching headlights spotting him. The cold, too, forced him to run back to the house every so often to keep from becoming hypothermic. When he finally hit the hard, lacquered lid of his prize, his teeth were chattering, his arms were burning, and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end from cold or paranoia or some horrid combination of both.

Throwing the shovel aside, he jumped into the misshapen hole. Panting and uncaring of who discovered him at this point, Jack undid the clasps on the coffin and flung the lid open. Lying there in a grey suit was a man, eyes closed peacefully as if he was sleeping. Jack would’ve believed he’d imagined the whole thing if he hadn't seen how torn the inside of the coffin lid was. Shaking, Jack picked up the man’s large, calloused hand and examined it. It was cold, and somewhat pale, and snagged on the nails were the same threads of cotton stuffing spilling from the top. He’d been scratching at the lid, trying to get out.

Jack shook the man gently. No response. Jack shook him again. Still nothing. “Shit,” Jack cursed. He put his two almost-numb fingers on the man’s wrist, pressing down in a few different places. Nothing.

Trying not to panic, he laid his fingers on the man’s neck, and finally felt a pulse; fluttering and faint, but present. Jack let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and collapsed against the dirt walls of the grave. “Thank Christ,” he sighed, resisting the urge to cry or shout or something in his relief.

For a moment, he languished there: a near-hypothermic man in the company of an open coffin with an undead corpse in a poorly re-dug grave. Contemplating the strange situation he was caught in only made Jack realized how half-baked his plan to rescue this Mark guy really was. Jack had no way to get the man out of the grave, no way to get his body back home, and no quick way to put the dirt back in the grave. His breath of relief turned to a groan of frustration. He was going to have to run back into the house, and he was going to have to find a way to get the body back without being seen. He’d definitely be arrested if he was spotted carting around someone’s lifeless body.

Standing and looking out of the grave, his eyes scoured the road next to the cemetery. All was quiet: no cars with bright headlights speeding by, no group of drunk college kids stumbling past. It only added to the surreality of the situation—Jack was alone in the world, completely alone, except for the body beside him and the distant drilling of a woodpecker.

Jack took another deep breath and surveyed his surroundings. Well, this was his life now. Hanging out in graves with corpses. Jack wasn’t denying his keen interest in death, but he couldn’t call this an ideal situation.

“I need to get my life together,” Jack muttered tiredly, looking at the man’s serene expression and feeling very far from serene himself.

Jack heaved himself out of the grave, apologizing for using Mark’s coffin as a step-stool as he went, and began the short trip back to his home. There had to be some way to bring the man’s body back....

Jack strained as he pulled the man’s body on the bright blue sled he’d retrieved from his attic. Despite the freezing temperatures, the ground wasn’t icy enough to offer any assistance, and “Mark” was much heavier than he looked. Not to mention that his whole body didn’t fit onto the sled, and his legs were dragging, which was slowing Jack down even more.

Getting him through the gate without waking up anyone in a 20-mile radius was difficult, to say the least. As Jack heaved, trying to hold open the gate and pull the sled, a dull clang sounded as the gate hit the man’s leg. Jack winced as if he had been hit.

“Oh, fuck me,” Jack hissed, dragging the rest of the man’s body through the gate. He’d have to check for bruises when they got into the house.

Next was the journey over the road. The plastic sled made the most disgusting grinding noise as it was pulled across the concrete, and Jack grit his teeth as the man’s feet flopped about behind the sled. Luckily, it was so late that Jack didn’t have to worry about cars running him and his cargo over, delivering a swift death (or, second death, in the man’s case.) Jack almost lost his body trying to get the sled onto the pavement, and then again trying to get up the porch to his front door.

Finally, Jack dragged the man’s body in and closed the door behind him. With considerable difficulty, he dragged the man’s body into the living room, and lifted him from the sled to the couch. Now that he was in the light, Jack was able to take a good look at him. He couldn’t be that much taller than Jack. His angled face remained peaceful and undisturbed, black hair falling across his closed eyes messily. A quick check showed that there was indeed a small bruise blooming across the olive skin where Jack had hit his leg with the gate.

It was strange that the man exhibited no signs of the dead and dying: no pallor, thinness, loss of hair; no rigor mortis, bloating, or “smell of death.” His hair was still thick, his skin still a healthy color. He’d been infuriatingly limp when Jack was dragging him here, and he didn’t smell like rotting flesh. Not to mention that Jack had felt his pulse. For a man who’d just been dug out of a four-foot grave, a grave he’d been trapped in for months, he was so far from dead that it was almost laughable.

Jack spared a glance at the wall clock. It was almost 12 in the morning. He’d had no idea that he’d been out for so long, but his realization of the time opened the floodgates to his fatigue. As important as it was to figure out what he was going to do with the man’s body if he woke up (or if he didn’t wake up), he would have plenty of time for that tomorrow.

Barely avoiding tripping on the step leading to the hallway, Jack trudged to his bedroom. Struggling to keep his eyes open, he changed lethargically and climbed under the covers. It took only moments for sleep to overtake him.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are super duper appreciated, and (as always) I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Make sure you subscribe to the story if you want a notif when I finally write and publish the next chapter. Hopefully it won't take me a year to write it :-P


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